James Valvis- Two Poems

James Valvis has placed poems or stories in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Green Hill Literary Lantern, Ploughshares, River Styx, The Sun, Tar River Poetry, and many others. His poetry was featured in Verse Daily. His fiction was chosen for Sundress Best of the Net. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle.

 

 

Spinning

 

let’s get down

to the nub here

 

if Thomas Jefferson

or William Shakespeare

or Martin Luther King

 

or whatever historical figure

you can come up with

 

is really “spinning

in his grave…”

 

newly conscious

down there in the dark

of ancient coffins

 

all old flesh gone

and nothing but bones

 

rattling like empty pens

inside a jammed desk draw

 

he has bigger problems

than whatever little issue

you’re pissed off about

 

 

 

Rejected Poems

 

Of all tragedies this is the least.

Yet my poet friend allows them

to corrupt mind and mood,

like dead fish in a pond,

inky blood muddying water.

It takes days to scoop them out, he says,

and go on again with the work.

When I was young, I also

fell into despondency.

So much victory seemed elsewhere.

It took me a lifetime to accept my defeat,

and only then did I see a little success.

Now just sometimes does the stink

stifle me, but still sometimes.

I don’t find it helps to talk about it

or know that others share this fate,

but my poet friend tells me

I should open up about my failures,

since he’d find that encouraging.

I want to invite him to the hole I dug

in my heart, show him

where I bury the bones of hope,

let the burial mound of my failures

be a hill upon which

he could at last look down on me.